Go/no-go, tap green, never red

What it asks of you

Go/no-go asks for your brakes. Tapping green again and again builds a ready movement, and the red signal asks you to stop it in time. That ability to cancel a reflex is called response inhibition.

It is the skill behind not answering a notification the second it lands, or not clicking before you read. The game makes it visible in 20 seconds.

How to play

1. A circle flashes in the middle, for about a third of a second.
2. Green, tap as fast as you can.
3. Red ring, do nothing.
4. Forty signals, three in four green, never more than two reds in a row.
5. Your score goes from 0 to 100. A tap on red costs more than a missed green.

The research behind it

Franciscus Donders described the ancestor of this task in 1868, answering one signal while ignoring another (Donders, 1868). It has since become a core tool to study how the brain stops a response, with a frontal area called the pre-SMA active across versions of the task (Simmonds et al., 2008).

Its commission errors, the taps on red, are among the most reliable of the classic attention measures, with a test retest reliability of 0.76 (Hedge et al., 2018). And practising a task makes you better at that task (Simons et al., 2016). Twenty seconds a day keeps that brake in practice.

On your weekly card

Go/no-go feeds your Focus stat. It shares the focus slot of the morning routine with Color.

It is also one of the three games of your very first session in the app, with Duel and Sequence.

Questions

Does go/no-go diagnose ADHD?

No. The task is used in attention research, but a 20 second game cannot diagnose anything. Only a clinical assessment by a professional can.

Why does a red tap cost more?

A tap on red is the error the game is about, the brake that failed. It weighs 70% of the score, a missed green 30%.

Where is the full test?

The go/no-go test page explains the score in detail, with its reliability and its limits.

Sources

1. Hedge C., Powell G., Sumner P. (2018). The reliability paradox. Behavior Research Methods 50(3), 1166 to 1186. PMC5990556. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0935-1
2. Donders F.C. (1868, translated 1969). On the speed of mental processes. Acta Psychologica 30, 412 to 431. doi.org/10.1016/0001-6918(69)90065-1
3. Simmonds D.J., Pekar J.J., Mostofsky S.H. (2008). Meta-analysis of Go/No-go tasks. Neuropsychologia 46(1), 224 to 232. doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2007.07.015
4. Simons D.J., Boot W.R., Charness N. et al. (2016). Do brain training programs work? Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17(3), 103 to 186. doi.org/10.1177/1529100616661983